Clearspan^® is a complete turnkey solution from a company with 30 years of experience in the large enterprise communications business. Aastra offers not only a comprehensive suite of applications but also the hardware and software necessary for a complete solution as well as expert services for design, implementation and support of large scale communications systems.

Communication Manager

The heart of the system is the communications manager, a series of cooperating services that deliver all of the Clearspan applications. These services communicate among themselves using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The Application Server delivers all of the user and system features across applications with support from Network, Media, Conference, Session Manager and Web servers implemented as needed in redundant sets of physical servers. The server sets can be geographically separated for disaster tolerance and can support from 1,500 to hundreds of thousands of users.

Management System

The management systems provides provisioning, administrative, alarm management and other services to keep Clearspan systems running at their peek capability. The system manages the resources, traffic and performance indications from Clearspan components and provides comprehensive and predictive analysis for pre-emptive action.

• Multi-tiered architecture
• Up to 5,000 managed nodes
• Upward Integration (Tivoli, CA, HP, MS, SMS, MOM, BMC, NetIQ)

SIP Session Manager

The SIP Session Manager (SSM) provides a variety of services to make Clearspan responsive, flexible and secure. The SSM works in conjunction with your existing Firewalls to manage SIP session security, both inside and outside the LAN/WAN environment. The SSM provides:

• SIP Session Security Management
• SIP Aware NAT Traversal
• Microsoft LCS/OCS Integration
• DOS and Intrusion Prevention

Gateways

Clearpsan offers a variety of Gateway devices that provide IP to PSTN and/or Analog Telephones. These Gateways are SIP based and provide both signaling and voice conversions. Gateways are available in a variety of port and traffic capacities depending on the design needs of the system. In addition to providing Clearspan interfaces to traditional PSTN and telephony devices, gateways provide an interface to older PBX and Keysystem sites so that those users can become Clearspan users without changing the phones on their desks.

Edge Routers

Edge Routers (also called access routers) are used in small to medium locations to enable secure and reliable access to both the Internet and the PSTN. Edge routers combine a number of capabilities in a single box such as a WAN router interface, multiple ethernet LAN ports, NAT/DHCP, T1 and Analog PSTN ports, analog station ports, Wi-Fi, and VoIP survivability. They offer enterprises reduced operational and capital expenses of up to 90% while improving call quality, security, and simplifying the user experience. They are an all-in-one solution that contain all of the features needed to deliver business class VoIP services.

Enterprise Applications

One of the key concepts of Unified Communications is the idea of adding communication capabilities to business processes and enterprise applications. Clearspan provides a rich set of interfaces to allow integration with Clearspan applications. All of the interfaces are based on industry standards or standard programming methods for fast and effective integration. Using these capabilities Clearspan users can add the following capabilities to their existing applications:

• Call Control – Dial, answer, manage and release calls
• Call Status – Notifications of the status and changes to calls in process
• Call History – Placed, missed and received call plus call detail
• Service Control – Enabling and disabling Clearspan Services
• Media Control – Conferencing, digit collection, Play/record, Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text (if equipped)

Server Platform

Clearspan is deployed on IBM^® BladeCenter^™ servers. The IBM BladeCenter is an advanced blade system which integrates servers, storage and networking into a single chassis — yielding significant simplification, improved density and potential TCO savings . A single family of common server blades, storage, I/O, switches and networking modules are fully supported and interchangeable across the family of BladeCenter chassis. The IBM BladeCenter chassis is designed as the ideal solution for data center deployments.

Download BladeCenter Datasheet »

LAN /WAN Infrastructure

Clearspan is an open system capable of running on any network infrastructure that meets the minimum standards for delivering quality voice in the enterprise. Aastra can also provide full LAN/WAN installation services for Greenfield or network replacement implementations.

Endpoints

Clearspan is device independent and users can access features and functions from a variety of devices such as SIP phones, PC Softphones, Cell Phones, Residential phones and Digital phones behind existing PBX systems. Aastra offers a wide variety of world class SIP terminal products for use with Clearspan as well as SIP-DECT wireless systems, PC Softphones and tools for integrating telephony into popular desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.